The magazine had four hours of hands-on time with Ground Zeroes, which were used to play through the main mission and experiment with extra modes. (Note: this seems to suggest the game, minus potential side missions, is less than four hours long.) And for The Phantom Pain, it promises new details and screenshots showing off the Fox Engine powering it all.

“The magazine had four hours of hands-on time with Ground Zeroes, which were used to play through the main mission and experiment with extra modes.” I hope this is not saying that the entire Ground Zeroes main mission is only 4 hours long. Then again, most games seem to be that length now days…but those games offer MP as well. A few more hours from extra modes doesnt seem to warrant 20 dollars. Or do I have the price wrong?

Gigus

Its forty bucks :/ 30 on ps3 and 360

Budgiecat

$10 next gen tax

Anime10121

lol basically, though I’ll gladly pay it, its the reason I jumped next gen so fast. :P

gekitsu

i dont know – for one, i see nothing wrong when these four hours are damn good four hours. quantity isnt quality, and i dont see much value in saying how much gameplay time my money should buy.
by that logic, the next best boring-as-fuck and stretched out 100+ hour grindfest is worth an above average price, and the brilliant portal can never be close to the value of a “real” game despite being crafted in a much higher quality fashion than most full price releases.
meanwhile, a 60 usd/eur call of duty or somesuch, with a throwaway campaign and paint by numbers multiplayer, neither of those being of even average value from a quality point of view, is seemingly an okay proposition because, hey, i can spend countless hours playing a badly crafted game against random people, 8/10 would throw money at again.

secondly, we dont know anything about replayability yet. if (hypothetically speaking) 4h gets you in a beeline from main mission start to finish, how much else is there? multiple ways of dealing with tricky areas, optional goals, extra missions… thats too early to call, imho.

thirdly, dont underestimate how much one can stretch whats actually happened when one can write something incendiary about a topic a lot of people are worried about.

Anime10121

I approve this post.

It’s funny how people try to covert hours into dollars. Especially considering your average game is between 8-10 hours and retails for $60, so I’m guessing they’re rallying for RPGs with 30-40 hrs of gameplay to cost $180-$240. $20-$30 for a 4 hour experience is more than fair. And people complaining about the $40 next gen cost…nobodies forcing you to buy it for a next gen console.

Budgiecat

eh…..for an semi open world game, it should not be 4 hours long imo

gekitsu

isnt “main quest time” an especially useless measure for open world things?

looking at skyrim, for example, the main quest time is frustratingly trivial, compared to what is actually in the game. now, gz most likely isnt anywhere near the elder scrolls balance of main quest vs additional world stuff, but just taking the main mission in account still strikes me as not very meaningful when the prospect of the game is “…and then you can fool around in the world, too.”

Budgiecat

But they didn’t emphasize just ‘main quest’. They also mentioned extra modes…..

gekitsu

yeah, what constitutes “experimenting with the extra modes” isnt exactly clear wording. its somewhere between just starting/not finishing a few missions/challenges/whatever the meaningful increment is, and taking a comprehensive sample of everything on the buffet.

from how i am reading it, “experiment” should mean something like trying a bit here and there, but nothing that amounts to a substantial percentage of whats offered. or else “experiment” would be a strange word. but obviously, thats all guesswork, and your guess is as good as mine.

all in all, “experiment” does (should!) not mean “finish, s-rank, done-and-over” so there should be more than 4h in all of gz. how much (and more importantly: how good it is) will have to be seen.

gekitsu

a lot of what makes a good conversion rate from dollars to hours also lies in how the game is to be played.

ikaruga is played through in under 30 minutes. rpgs with a huge world and countless things to find and explore can gobble up north of 100 hours. and then there is minecraft.

just for shits and giggles:
8–10 h for 60$ is 6–7.5 $/h
4 h for 30–40$ is 7.5–10 $/h
thats already pretty close, so can be considered a fair price if the 4h are above average quality. (easily attainable when you consider the quality of an average aaa game)
now if the claimed 4h are just main quest time and not a proper estimation of general play time, this looks absolutely normal, maybe even cheap.

its as if people tried really hard to get worked up and angry.

Morino*Basa

Just because it may be worth it to you or me doesn’t mean it’s not exorbitantly priced.

gekitsu

see a few replies down. it isnt.

an average 8–10 h game for 60$ is 6–7.5 $/h
a 4 h game for 30–40$ is 7.5–10 $/h

if 4 hours is all there is to gz, its just above average, but not outrageously so (compare portal: 30$ on amazon for ~2.5h of gameplay).

if, which is highly likely from the way this is worded, 4 h is rushing through the main campaign and having little time for what else there is to play, it comes in at an average price range, and may even end up cheap, depending on how much time investment oportunity there is.

and mainly, all this doesnt even address that dollars per hour is one of the least useful measures to apply to entertainment.

Morino*Basa

Since we’re just repeating ourselves: it’s relative to the individual consumer whether or not the price is worth the time involved. Your opinion does not magically render $20-40 a low price.

gekitsu

yes, thats obviously always true.

whats also true is that GZ, as outlined here, is not significantly more expensive per hour than an average game.
at worst, its above average, but cheaper than portal.

hardly the “OMG ALMOST FULL PRICE FOR A TUTORIAL LOL!” fit everyone is throwing.

http://kougeru.tumblr.com/ Kougeru

Normally I would agree with this but that’s not how the industry works. Every “real” game new is 60 dollars regardless if it’s an AAA title or if it’s the next tie-in movie game. I’m sure people here remember me whining about Skyrim being overrated. I got it from a friend via Steam and put over 100 hours into it. Of course 30 or so of those hours were traveling across the copy-and-pasted map but overall I still felt the game was only worth about 30 dollars tops due to the repetitiveness of it. I just don’t see how GZ can even compare to that unless the side missions are pretty crazy. If it’s 30 dollars, I’ll just rent it but if it’s 20 I’ll buy it. Yes, 10 dollars makes a big difference in the lives of some people.

gekitsu

well, yes :) the whole business of just calculating dollars into hours of entertainment the player should somehow be entitled to, is obviously flawed to begin with. the mere fact that the rare actually great aaa title and every lame movie tie-in occupy the same rank in dollars-per-hour ends that case right there. ;)

the whole math bit really was only to show that, even besides this being a stupid metric, gz isnt priced so far out there as it is often made out to be.

when we really consider whether a game is worth buying, there is obviously so much more to it. your example of how you perceive you many skyrim hours as low value per hour illustrates that perfectly. available budget obviously also plays a role. and also how “time” is calculated. this is simple for fixed length linear stories, but gets more complicated with the potentially endless time of free form/open world games or the repetition factor of arcade games. (most games being somewhere inbetween, having a little of everything)

long story short: whether it is worth buying is something everyone has to decide for him/herself. :)

MrRobbyM

Games other than RPGs are at least 10 hours usually. This is more like an overpriced tutorial that will probably come packaged with the full game eventually. I’m just going to rent it.

Gigus

Hmm…. sexy yoji shinkawa art.

DarthBrian

They want $40 for a less-than-four hour game? Does it come with a Zone of the Enders game too? >_<

icecoffemix

I’d buy it if that were really the case.

But I think Konami forget it even exist now…

McPoo

Wow its less than 4 hours? I haven’t really followed this game at all, I thought it was two full sized games making up MGSV.

Gigus

Ground zeros act as a prologue to the main game which is phantom pain. So kojima is releasing two games.

PrinceHeir

hype as well for my JPN import(it has english subs! Akio-san!!)

let’s goo!!!

Budgiecat

But this is an American game. Kojima is American. We speak American here….

Anime10121

lol, coke right :P

PrinceHeir

you forgot Fuck Yeah Murrica :P

Anime10121

If it weren’t for the fact that importing would cost more/take longer to arrive, I’d import too, I’m not really too fond of Sutherland’s Snake :(

Hopefully when I actually play the game, I’ll change my opinion…but so far, from what I heard, it’s not too great :(

PrinceHeir

i’m only importing since i really prefer Akio-san over the years.

both sides have amazing voice direction so there’s not really problem if you pick either one or the other.